Camera in Hand, Italian at Heart

The Cinematography of Darius Khondji

The Iranian-French cinematographer Darius Khondji, above, who says he feels more like an Italian.Credit
Ed Alcock for The New York Times

PARIS

AS the cinematographer for Woody Allen’s latest film, “To Rome With Love,” Darius Khondji arrived on the set in the title city with double vision.

First there was the dark side: the trauma of more than 50 years ago, when Mr. Khondji was 3 ½ and, on a family visit to Rome from Tehran, sneaked out of the Excelsior hotel on the Via Veneto in search of a toy store.

He got lost. A policeman picked him up. Some nuns housed him in their convent near the Spanish Steps. The policeman offered to adopt him. It took three days before his parents found him.

Then, there was the sunny side: a love of all things Italian so big that Mr. Khondji prefers to speak Italian rather than French or English; he jokes that though he is the son of an Iranian father and a French mother, he was Italian in a previous life.

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David Fincher’s “Seven,” with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.Credit
Peter Sorel/New Line Cinema

In an interview in the dimly lighted kitchen of his 18th-century house near the Saint-Sulpice church here, he couldn’t stop himself from slipping into Italian between sips of espresso from a gold-and-white china cup. With his dark eyes and wild hair, his big gestures and even bigger laugh, he boasts that he could pass for an Italian.

“If my parents hadn’t found me, I would have been raised as a real Roman boy,” he said. “I have lived most of my life in Paris, but I have a connection with Rome that I have with no other place. I’m attached by invisible strings. I’m half-haunted by the fact I was lost there as a child. Il mio cuore è italiano.” (My heart is Italian.)

Darkness hovers over all Mr. Khondji’s work, but his latest, and third, project with Mr. Allen is also infused with light: rich, orange and mellow. (The film, which opened in June in a few cities, has been expanding nationally this month.) The 56-year-old cinematographer used a collection of older lenses to give more saturation of color to the two stories involving Italians, modern lenses with crisper definition when filming the two Americans-in-Rome stories.

Both he and Mr. Allen dislike bright sunlight, so they commissioned a company in Milan to make giant helium-filled mattresses that they hoisted 40 feet in the air to block out the harsh midday light. Sometimes they would throw on a layer of black netting or silk on the mattresses to filter out even more.

“With Woody the best parallel is music,” Mr. Darius said. “If you play in tune with him and get his rhythm, he will give you all the freedom to improvise as you tell his story.”

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He has “the soul of an artist,” James Gray, left, said of Darius Khondji, on the set of his new film.Credit
Anne Joyce

In an e-mail message Mr. Allen described Mr. Khondji as “one of the elite cameramen in the world, a very sensitive artist.”

It is this blend of inventiveness and flexibility that makes Mr. Khondji so sought after. In early July he was in Mykonos filming a new perfume ad for Dior. This week he heads to New York to fine-tune the color in James Gray’s untitled new film set in 1920s New York and starring Marion Cotillard, Joaquin Phoenix and Jeremy Renner.

“He’s a technically superb craftsman with the soul of an artist,” Mr. Gray said in a telephone interview from New York. “He’s into new things that are technically wrong but achieve a certain emotional effect. Like letting half the frame go black, or letting an actor fall off into the darkness on purpose. I love the man.”

Mr. Khondji also has a reputation as a cameraman who knows how to listen to directors and make their message his own.

In filming a 2011 Dior perfume commercial with Charlize Theron at Versailles he was faced with the challenge of lighting the gold, crystal and mirrors of the Galerie des Glaces.

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Joaquin Phoenix and Marion Cotillard in Mr. Gray’s film, which is set in 1920s New York and also stars Jeremy Renner.Credit
Anne Joyce

“I wanted a night scene at Versailles,” Jean-Jacques Annaud, the French film director who directed the ad, said in a telephone interview from Beijing. “Gold is much richer with candlelight. So we covered every single window pane, something like 400, with pieces of black plywood.” Mr. Khondji used only low-lighted candelabras and shot with his lens wide open.

The two men bonded. “We picked the same angles and had the same taste,” Mr. Annaud continued. “We spent long evenings over dinner every night. It was shared pleasure.”

Mr. Khondji came by his love of film at an early age. He watched his first movies from his perch in a stroller. His father, a successful businessman who helped start Iran’s cotton industry, bought two large movie theaters in central Tehran that showed the latest French and Italian films. Mr. Khondji’s nanny preferred the movie theater to the park.

As a child growing up in a French suburb, he would take the train into central Paris to see horror films: “Psycho,” “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and anything about vampires or ghosts.

At 12 he bought a plastic eight-millimeter camera with his allowance. His first work was a series of short Dracula films; he was director, cameraman and star. “I appeared very rarely in the film,” he said. “It’s much better when you don’t show the monster.”

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Clip: 'To Rome With Love'

A scene from Woody Allen's "To Rome With Love," with cinematography by Darius Khondji.

A mediocre student in the rigid French educational system, he moved after his first year in college to New York, studying cinema at New York University with Haig Manoogian, Martin Scorsese’s professor, and Jonas Mekas, the experimental filmmaker. He resisted all exhortations to focus on directing. (He also took courses at the International Center of Photography.)

Back in Paris he studied editing and worked first as an assistant cameraman, then as a lighting director on music videos and commercials.

His first break as a cinematographer came with the 1991 film “Delicatessen,” collaborating with the directing team of Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. A turning point came four years later on David Fincher’s “Seven,” with a technical breakthrough in which he created a delicate bleaching process that retained the silver in the prints and produced the blackest of blacks.

Much of his other work has explored darkness, including “Alien: Resurrection” with Mr. Jeunet (1997), “The Ninth Gate” with Roman Polanski (1999), “Panic Room” with Mr. Fincher (2002) and “My Blueberry Nights” with Wong Kar-wai (2008). In Michael Haneke’s film “Amour,” which won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, he moved the camera slowly and faded into black to capture the sadness of an octogenarian couple facing their mortality.

An exception to the darkness-is-better approach was his work with Bernardo Bertolucci on “Stealing Beauty” (1996), in which he bathed the characters and the Tuscan countryside in a warm golden light.

Video

Clip: 'Midnight in Paris'

A scene from Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris," with cinematography by Darius Khondji.

He transferred that sensibility to the three Woody Allen films, including the romantic comedies “Anything Else” in 2003 and “Midnight in Paris,” Mr. Allen’s runaway box-office hit, in 2011.

“I followed his vision of Paris, which was more interesting than I thought,” he said. “He imagined it overcast and raining all the time. We went out in the street shooting, and it started raining, and we were chasing the rain. The rain you see in the movie is real rain.”

To capture the dreamlike Paris of the 1920s, he softened the images by using vintage lenses. For modern Paris he used modern, wider-angle ones, more camera movements and brighter, crisp light.

(Still, Mr. Khondji is determined to have balance in his life — he is married with three children — and he turned down Mr. Allen’s offer to work on a fourth project together. “Woody is one of my heroes,” Mr. Khondji said. “He’s so sweet. But I’m taking a break.”)

Despite numerous awards Mr. Khondji has never won an Oscar and has been nominated only once — for Alan Parker’s 1996 musical “Evita.”

“I’m not a prizewinner,” he said. “It doesn’t hurt me. Like Woody always says, ‘It’s not good to follow these things.’ When the director is really, really happy, that’s my prize.”

The only time Mr. Khondji was flustered during the interview was when he was being photographed. “Believe me, I don’t like being photographed,” he said. “I don’t like myself in pictures. Actually I do sometimes. But when I have a light like this on me, I’m really nervous because it’s creating bad shadows on the face, no? Let’s not talk about the light on my face anymore.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 15, 2012, on page AR10 of the New York edition with the headline: Camera in Hand, Italian at Heart. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe